Mindfully Present

(light music) Headspace Studios. (light music) Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday morning. Now, I don't know what the new trends of 2021 are gonna be, but looking back over the last year, I remember, especially during the pandemic and lockdown and everything else that was going on, there were a lot of people who were engaged in new hobbies, new activities, and in particular I had a lot of people reach out and say they were doing things like mindful coloring and mindful puzzles and things like this. And I'm always slightly intrigued by this idea of putting mindful before an activity. Because it suggests that somehow all other activities are somehow not mindful. No, I totally understand. I sit down and do coloring and painting and things with my kids sometimes. And it's really relaxing, I enjoy it. But I can also say that there are times when I color and paint and I'm mindful with it and there are other times when I'm not so mindful. We can be there coloring really, really beautifully and yeah, involved in thinking about something. There's nothing mindful about that act. Just because it's called a mindful coloring book doesn't make it a mindful activity, you know? And in just the same way, just because it's a mindful puzzle doesn't make it mindful. What makes it mindful is how we show up and how present we are in that activity, every single moment in our life. Every activity is an opportunity to be mindful. You know, even in the monastery it wasn't as though every single day all day there was just meditation. There were other things we had to do. Whether it was sweeping up, or gardening, or cooking, or you know, whatever it might be. Every single thing was treated in the same way. It didn't matter whether it was a formal meditation session. It didn't matter whether it was another activity. Every activity, every moment was an opportunity to be mindful. As you head into your day today, maybe you've already done some meditation, maybe it's still to come. But either way, as you head into your day, think of that as an idea. Those moments in a day that seem perhaps to be, annoying, inconvenient, maybe even a waste of time. Seen through the right lens, those are opportunities. They're opportunities to be present, to be undistracted, to be curious, to be interested. And when we do that, every single moment is another moment to train your mindfulness. And look, we're all gonna define the idea of a precious human life in different ways. But for me, a life that's lost in distraction where we're either lost to the past or lost in a future that hasn't yet been lived, that seems like a terrible waste of a human life. A life where we spend more time present appreciating each and every moment. And that feels like a real gift, a...